I joined Sequoia Capital one year ago today. The past year has been filled with incredible people, technologies beyond my wildest imaginations, and visions of solving the world’s hardest problems. It was also filled with self-doubt and some disillusionment. Here are some reflections on my time so far at Sequoia and in venture capital.
Why did I join Sequoia?
A lot of people were surprised to see me make the jump to VC, including myself. I started my career in product marketing at Microsoft, moved to growth marketing and later product management at Uber, and continued on to be a PM at Facebook. “I’ve always seen you as a builder,” my friends told me. And to be honest, being an investor had never even crossed my mind. I loved my job as a product manager and I felt I was good at it. I saw myself becoming a head of product or starting my own company.
So how did I end up at Sequoia? A touch of serendipity and Sequoia’s willingness to take a chance on me.
Sequoia reached out because my experience in growth, marketing, and product fit the profile of what they were looking for in their next investor, but I told them that I wasn’t ready to make the move into venture. As luck would have it, I kept running into one of the partners at a coffee shop in San Francisco. Through these serendipitous coffee chats, I came to learn how critical company building is to investing and what an extraordinary opportunity it was to join Sequoia.
Here’s what made me take the leap of faith:
The quality of the people
Every single person I spent time with at Sequoia possessed incredible raw intellect, a broad and deep understanding of industries and technologies, and was also sincerely kind and humble. My meetings with Sequoia felt less like interviews and more like spirited debates on the future of industries and new technologies.
The unparalleled learning experience
My friend and former colleague, Andrew Chen, once described venture to me as “the smartest people in the world sharing their best ideas with you.” And that’s pretty accurate. The thing that drew me to technology when I started my career was how rapidly it changes: no two days are the same. In venture, you have to stay on the cutting edge of new trends or you will become obsolete.
At Uber, I was always extremely excited about innovations in autonomous vehicles, frequently attending tech talks in my free time. At Sequoia, I got to learn about autonomous vehicles as a part of my job. I dove deeply into every component of a self driving car, from the LiDAR and other sensors that help the vehicles detect the objects around them, to the 3D mapping they use for navigation, to the perception and planning algorithms that identify objects and decide what to do. I even got to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Chris Urmson, the founder and CEO of Aurora and a pioneer in the industry — it was a dream come true. After spending a lot of time researching the space and meeting different companies, I developed an informed point of view of my own. I was even able to give a talk on the topic at Stanford.
The opportunity to influence change
Investors are uniquely positioned between the world’s hardest problems and the people building technology solutions to solve those problems. As a result, investors have the ability to influence change across a large breadth of industries.
I’m an optimist by nature, so this blog post paints a very rosy picture of tech and venture, but there are many areas where there is a lot of work to be done. For example it severely lacks diversity. There is a tendency to pattern match in ways that end up giving more dollars and jobs to people with similar backgrounds. Most investing and hiring is sourced from personal networks, which excludes industry outsiders and underrepresented communities.
Venture is an incredible leverage point to ignite change in the industry. By investing in and hiring people from underrepresented backgrounds and encouraging our startups to make culture and diversity a priority from Day 1, we can ensure that the billion dollar companies of tomorrow are more inclusive than the ones of today. I’m encouraged by concrete steps Sequoia is taking to move the needle and was honored to represent Sequoia at events like Grace Hopper and WeCode.
The transition from operating to investing
I’m not going to lie, ramping up was HARD. In many ways it felt like my first job: I felt I lacked many relevant skills, had the wrong habits, and had no idea where to even begin.
From “move fast and break things” to “measure 100 times and cut once”
At a rapidly growing startup, your priority is to build, test, and repeat. Your pace of innovation is directly correlated with your growth, market share, and whether you get crushed by a competitor or an incumbent. It’s no wonder that “move fast” and “perfect is the enemy of good” have become biblical mantras in Silicon Valley. In product, we ship MVPs knowing things are still rough in order to gather data from customers and iterate our way to product market fit.
At Sequoia, we value fast iteration in the startups we partner with, but we don’t have the same leeway ourselves. We have one shot to make a decision, sometimes worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There is no iterating. If you make a wrong decision, it will live with you and the firm forever. A poor decision could result in money lost for great causes like university endowments and nonprofits (our LPs). As a result, attention to detail is critical. Changing my style has been very challenging.
From one “north star” to dozens of different industries and metrics at the same time
When working at a company, most of my brainpower was spent on one specific problem in a single industry. When I worked at Uber, our mission was to make transportation as reliable as running water. I lived and breathed transportation and mobility. At Sequoia, I context switch between half a dozen industries daily. I might meet with companies in VR, supply chain, consumer goods, real estate, and gaming all in one day. In order to make an informed decision on each one, I need to keep track of different framework for evaluation and metrics for each industry, which often makes my head spin.
From short to long feedback cycles
In product and in performance marketing, you know right away if what you’re doing is working or not. You launch a campaign and instantly see if customers are signing up. You launch a product and instantly know if customers are using it. This is not the case for venture capital. It takes years, even decades, for an investment to prove out and the journey to greatness is not linear.
Despite all the differences, there are some similarities. My experience in product and marketing is undoubtedly useful when helping companies scale and in evaluating growth. Thinking about a new investment is not too different from thinking about a new product; similar to product managers, investors leverage data, customer feedback, and market research to make decisions. We also spend a lot of time thinking about unit economics, long-term market forces, and competitive dynamics.
What it’s like to work at Sequoia
Many founders I talk to are curious about what happens behind the curtain here. Most people are familiar with Sequoia’s legendary investments in Google, Apple, YouTube, Instagram, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Stripe, Dropbox and the list goes on. Here are a few things that stand out to me about the culture behind these walls:
The team over an individual
When I was considering making this career jump, my friends told me “I’m not sure you’ll like it, you’re so team-oriented and VC is a lone-wolf job.” While that may be true at some firms, I have found the opposite to be true at Sequoia.
From my experience, every partner at Sequoia puts the firm’s interests before their own. That means sharing prospective investments with someone else if they have more relevant expertise. It also means working together on investments and crediting every single person who helped a company after a successful outcome.
Investing and company building are both very collaborative, each partner brings a unique perspective: from sales, to marketing, to product, to engineering, to finance. After we make the investment, everyone goes above and beyond to help our portfolio companies, regardless of whether they sit on the board.
Despite extraordinary successes, everyone is incredibly kind and humble. For a team offsite, we cooked meals at the Ronald McDonald House for families who had loved ones in the hospital. Everyone pitched in cooking, cleaning dishes and serving.
Nothing replaces the power of hard work and focus in driving results
Everyone on the team is incredibly hard working, willing to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. Whether that’s dialing in to meetings from across the globe at 3am, staying up all weekend to comb through every piece of data on a company and industry, or dropping all plans to aid a portfolio company during a time of need, Sequoia believes in sustained persistence and execution. The moment you rest on your laurels is the moment you lose.
Integrity and trust are the most important principles
It doesn’t matter how quickly revenue is scaling or how decorated the team is on paper, nothing will ruin a company’s chances of getting an investment from Sequoia more quickly than dishonesty or a history of low-integrity behavior.
In Summary
The last year has been exciting, challenging, and terrifying all at the same time. I continue to be inspired by every single founder I meet and I’m grateful for the extraordinary privilege of hearing their visions and dreams, not to mention the opportunity to help along the journey. If you’re interested partnering with Sequoia, learning more about venture, or just want to chat, email me at amy@sequoiacap.com.
